We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  So, lost in my thoughts, I got out at the wrong stop, now I’m also going to have to take quite a hike to go see Raimondo. Yesterday I remembered that he lives in an apartment building that has the longest, steepest garage ramp in the world, a good hundred feet of cement with a super-rough surface that ends in a sharp elbow turn sprinkled with fine gravel. Many years ago, after trying unsuccessfully all afternoon to break our necks, we found ourselves at the top of the ramp on our high-handlebar banana seat Graziella bikes, and he told me: “We need to take the descent pedaling as hard as we can go, then hit the curve without once touching our brakes.” A minute later—just long enough for me to convince him that he’d had an excellent idea and that therefore, according to my theory concerning the direct assumption of responsibility, he ought to be the first one to go down the ramp—he wound up running full speed against the wall. The marks are still there. On Raimondo, not on the wall.

  If he only had different parents, Raimondo and I would be great friends. We’d spend all our Saturday afternoons together, we’d have our own gang and pretty girls to go around with us. Instead, in the winter he never goes out because he has to work at the family bar over the Termini train station, and the same thing in the summer because his folks keeping taking over the operation of the bar in Torvaianica. Managing to play together is quite an undertaking, one that always requires a gigantic subterranean organizational machine. As soon as his parents loosen their grip just a bit he hurries over to my house, and I think that means that I’m his best friend, even if then he spends most of his time playing Papà’s guitars. He adores the Martin D-28, which, according to my old man, is a guitar that was made to play Elvis songs even though, for the past few years, it’s been doing a first-class job of playing Italian artists like Baglioni, Battisti, and Celentano, too. It must be horrible to be born to parents who only think about working. Raimondo isn’t even allowed to decide what to wear and, in fact, just like me, he’s the favorite butt of his classmates’ jokes. Leather loafers, wide-wale corduroy pants, white shirt, and sleeveless wool sweater, that’s how you ruin a son. I suggested he talk to them, but he told me it’s pointless. His mother has a perennially intimidatory attitude, every word that spills out of her mouth comes with an exclamation mark attached. From “buongiorno” to “buonanotte,” every word seems like either an order or a threat. She’s fixated on discipline and the importance of focusing on priorities. One time, Papà asked her if she could drop Raimondo off at our house on a Sunday. The woman said no, Raimondo had to attend mass and then head straight over to the bar to help his father. Papà insisted, it struck him as absurd that the boy couldn’t come over at least once to play. She replied that “Playing! isn’t! a! priority!”

  Luckily Raimondo is in the yard, so I don’t have to ring the buzzer and risk having to speak to the old woman on the intercom. Hidden behind the wall, I try to catch his attention.

  “Raimondo . . . Raimondo-o-o.”

  “Hey, Al! What are you doing here?”

  He’s inspecting the windows of the house and he comes over with a broad smile on his face.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “At New Year’s I’m going to set off a bang that everyone else can only dream about . . . ”

  He points toward the section of the garden where he had been sitting. Concealed under a bush are a dozen or so boxes of firecrackers and a shoe box half full of black powder.

  “All I have to do is make a hole in the box, insert a fuse . . . and they’ll hear it go off all the way to Milan!”

  No mentally sound person would do anything of the sort, I have to make him understand what a terrible mistake he’s making.

  “Raimondo, trust me, you’re doing something stupid . . . ”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? If you pack it like that, your super-firecracker will just emit a burst of flame and a cloud of white smoke. If you want black powder to explode, you need to compress it and seal it!”

  35.

  At the Santamaria home, we’ve gone back to candlelight dinners. I blame the increase in the price of diesel fuel for the generator. The shadows trembling on the walls like in a horror movie, the liquid wax that sculpts stalactites down the shaft of the candle, the flame over which you can heat up the handle of Vittoria’s fork, just for a laugh. I’m the only one who finds it exciting. I ask Papà to tell me a story about the air-raid shelters, Mamma asks me to leave him alone because he’s tired, I suggest to Vittoria that she hurry up and eat her meal because otherwise it’ll get cold, Papà tells me that if I’ve heated the handle of her fork again I’ll catch it this time. A grim evening. That’s another mysterious aspect of the world of adults: they lose their enthusiasm. If I like something, I like it every time. Not them, the magic of dining by candlelight has already begun to pall. And then Mamma is more irritable than anyone else.

  “Mario, please, can you keep this table from rocking?”

  “Al, stop jiggling your leg.”

  The furniture in our house seems like so many veterans of the Napoleonic army who are accompanying their general on a last mission. A handful of broken-down old men, sorely tried by the succession of moves, but still staunchly performing their duty. Instead of a medal as their reward, they’re given a saint card of the Virgin Mary folded in four under their wounded leg. Then that odious thing happens, and it always confuses me because it reminds me that my happiness isn’t enough to make everyone else happy. There’s something else in the world, aside from me, and it gets the better of me in the most unpredictable ways.

  “There, you see, now it’s all ruined!”

  While she was reaching for the bread, Mamma burned the sleeve of her sweater on the candle.

  “Let me see,” Papà says to her.

  “What do you want to see . . . I’ll just have to throw it away . . . like everything else in this house!”

  “Agnese, it’s just a sweater, we’ll buy you another one.”

  “Certainly, and now we’ll go shopping for sweaters when I don’t even have enough money to buy groceries! Do you know that three ounces of salami costs eighteen hundred lire now?”

  Vittoria huffs and gets up from the table. Because of the burnt sweater sleeve, I learn that fifteen thousand lire a week isn’t enough to do decent grocery shopping, that there was a job as an office worker but my father turned it down, no he didn’t turn it down, yes he certainly did turn it down, and that now Papà is running the risk of being fired, it’s all on account of his hair, the hair has nothing to do with it, it has everything to do with it, actually, because when you’re twenty it’s all fun and games, at thirty it’s eccentric, but at more than forty it’s just pathetic and sad. Then I learn a bunch of other things that tell me a great deal about the exact location of the human soul. I’ve always wondered about this, the important organs are always well protected, the brain in the skull, the heart in the chest cavity, behind the ribs, but what about the soul? Where is that hidden? I wrote in my human flesh diary that the soul is in the stomach. Because when Mamma said that we’ll all wind up out on the street, Papà replied that she could have just married someone else and she retorted that that probably would have been a better idea, and that’s when I felt the broken fragments dropping.

  I go to see Vittoria who’s lying in bed on her back with her legs propped at a ninety-degree angle straight up the wall. I wish I had a counterfeit Walkman to plug up my ears with. As soon as I get there, she heaves an exasperated sigh and turns her head in the opposite direction. Even if it’s hard to interpret the gesture as an invitation, I go ahead and sit down beside her. From her headphones blasts protest music at top volume, the piece is “Hula Hoop” by Plastic Bertrand, the protest is obviously against my father. In the other room the argument is spreading like wildfire until it reaches a not-otherwise specified offense dating back to the summer of 1965, I cover my ears with both hands, I sing the theme son
g to Judo Boy, Vittoria puts her hand on my knee. That works even better than a saint card of the Virgin Mary folded in four.

  I won’t get much sleep tonight, either. I thought I’d solved the economic question by launching Mamma’s chocolate ciambelloni, but it seems that was not enough. Inflation has hit seventeen percent and the only improvement brought about by the extra earnings is that Agnese and Mario Elvis’s periodic diet based on tea and zwieback toast has been upgraded to tea and regular toast. And then, if Papà actually lost his job, disaster would ensue: so long, toast of any kind, so long, sweet home. I’ll find a solution, though. I’m a big boy now, and I’m certainly not frightened by the idea of carrying my family on my shoulders.

  “Al . . . ”

  Vittoria is still awake, I’ll have to be quieter. Maybe I should start studying economics. If I really worked hard, in just a couple of years I could become an expert and launch the family into daring financial maneuvers.

  “A-a-al . . . ”

  She has superhearing, just like Mamma. The problem is that we need an immediate solution, in another couple of years we could already be living on the street. It’s a good thing I have broad shoulders, these problems would be enough to crush another young man with less personality.

  “Al . . . don’t move the bed!”

  “Just for tonight.”

  “No, you need to get used to sleeping alone.”

  “I am alone! There’s a curtain between us!”

  “Only for tonight, then starting tomorrow you’ll put your bed back on the opposite side of the room!”

  In my biography, they’ll write: “Because of his family’s economic problems, Al was forced to grow up in a hurry. A carefree youth was a luxury he was never able to afford.”

  36.

  “Well, how is Raimondo?” Papà asks me.

  “He doesn’t have anything serious wrong with him, but he’s grounded. He’s not allowed to receive visitors.”

  “Grounded even in the hospital? They could have at least waited for him to get home!”

  “Did he say anything to you? When are they going to release him?” Mamma asks.

  “I don’t know, I waved to him from the hallway and all he said to me was ‘All good!’”

  Truth be told, Raimondo gave me a thumbs-up and told me: “Super-firecracker test went okay!” but I don’t really want my folks to know he’s even more of a moron than they already think.

  “Even psychological torture . . . they only let him see his friends from the hallway.”

  “Mario, he could have been killed. What kind of games are these, I swear I don’t understand kids these days . . . ”

  This is one of the last generations of adults who don’t understand the games kids play, perhaps the last one who can bust our chops with the usual refrain about how we don’t know how to have fun, all they needed was a kite and a little wind. Soon my generation will take the helm, the generation of teenagers who fried their neurons in front of a television set with endless matches of Pong, who spent hours on the beach in the hot sun playing with a Zoom sliding ball on strings, holding our arms out wide to make that oval plastic rugby ball slide from one end of the strings to the other for no good reason, who experimented with the hallucinatory effect of the colored keys and electronic sounds of the Simon game. A kid from the early eighties will look at the absurd games of the children of the new millennium and if he even knows the meaning of shame, he’ll say nothing.

  With the long walk to and from the hospital, my tongue is as dry as a piece of cardboard. Now I go over and lie down on the sink, with my mouth open under the water faucet like Sylvester the Cat when he bites into a chili pepper instead of Tweety Bird.

  “Al, Vittoria’s inside with a friend . . . leave them alone, they’ll be going away soon.”

  “I’ll just go in for a second to get a glass of water and then I’ll come right back out.”

  I go in and take a seat in the living room.

  “Ciao,” I say to Vittoria and her friend.

  “Al, this is Giancarlo.”

  His hair is long, he has a messianic beard, his jeans are torn, he wears a long white smock of a shirt that hangs down to his knees, and a colorful headband across his forehead. When I say hello to him, he replies by holding his fingers up in a V sign. Unfortunately for him, it does him no good to smile at me because I already dislike him intensely, and I’m not about to change my mind just because I happen to find out that he’s intelligent, likable, a blood donor and a war hero. I’m not jealous of my sister, at all, she’d be welcome to date Pol Pot as long as she refrained from bringing him home. The point is that I know how it’s going to turn out with these boyfriends she chooses without consulting me, they are just playing, and she’s not, and then I’m the one who’s going to have to put up with months and months of depression and hysteria. I jam two fingers down my throat to make it clear to Vittoria just how disappointed I am and go off into the kitchen. She pretends to ignore me.

  “Do you want something to eat?” she asks Giancarlo.

  “Yes, Duck,” he replies.

  I retrace my steps. I stick my head in and silently pray I misheard.

  “He calls me Bucking Duck . . . it’s my Indian name.”

  What could be more obvious? The most normal thing in the world is a girl from the outskirts of Rome with an Indian name.

  “Are you one of those people who were rooting for the cowboys to win? If you knew the story of the Indians, you wouldn’t turn up your nose like that . . . ” Giancarlo butts in.

  Here’s another reader of Tex Willer who thinks he’s an authoritative expert on the subject. Vittoria realizes that this is going to end badly, but still she has no way to stop me.

  “I’ve studied it, as a matter of fact, and I call them Native Americans, not Indians, a term that actually applies to the inhabitants of India, obviously.”

  “Which means, for instance, that you know all about Sitting Bull and the Apaches?”

  “A little something. For instance, I know that Sitting Bull wasn’t an Apache at all, but a Hunkpapa Sioux, that the correct translation of his name would be Sitting Bison, since bulls and cows weren’t found in America prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Oh, and actually the name Apache itself is a misnomer because the tribe’s real name was . . . ”

  “All right, all right, I give up. You know the history,” he interrupts me, clearly annoyed.

  “Al, stop acting like a smarty-pants with Solitary Puma.”

  Here’s a nice way of clarifying matters: he is the super-cool Solitary Puma and she is the silly Bucking Duck. Puma tries to change the subject.

  “The renovation is inching along here, isn’t it?”

  Vittoria hastens to justify the situation.

  “We’re getting close, the bricklayers should be here any day now.”

  “Wait, for real?” I ask her.

  “Al, don’t be a pain in the ass . . . I’m sick of being made to look like a fool in front of my friends!” she whispers to me.

  Even considering the issue of what that native of the Garbatella thinks of us strikes me as absurd, but there is no doubt that the situation needs to be resolved. Already, Papà has contacted the bricklayers and masons three times, only to cancel the work at the last second. First it was because he had to get the car fixed after Vittoria crashed it during her first driving lesson, then to pay the dentist who was about to take us to court, and then finally because we had to buy a new refrigerator and washing machine after they refused to accept the last jury-rigged repair and simply gave up the ghost after being starved for too long of spare parts.

  The two of them are going out to a party. Vittoria has put on an oversized white T-shirt with shoulder pads, red high heels, and leg warmers like the ones Olivia Newton John popularized. The puma isn’t about to let that pass, he criticizes her apparel as “a mod
ern young person’s uniform.” Instead it was perfect. While she was getting ready, I couldn’t resist, and I slipped a note into her jacket pocket: “You are the prettiest Santamaria there ever was. (So try not to pollute your genetic patrimony, thanks.)”